This Arab Is Queer Quotes

“Fearful of loss, some people build a wall around their beloveds, thinking it will keep them close. Keep you safe. Insecurity smothers, habibi. Be wary of walls. They won’t change when you all do, and then what will you do?”
― Elias Jahshan, This Arab Is Queer: An Anthology by LGBTQ+ Arab Writers

“Those of us who suffer from severe anxiety and PTSD, in my case due to inferiority complexes and repeated emotional, physical and religious trauma from a young age, know that the fear of being found out by family is terrifying. Combine that with the fear of God’s wrath (something I can never seem to shake off completely, despite becoming an atheist many years ago), the fear of being jailed in a country where being queer is illegal, and the fear that your partner will sooner or later realise that you’re this shaken shell of a human being and leave you because of it –it all creates this ultra-alert yet sad and anxious, broken robot. One with zero confidence and zero self-trust, and who is incapable of vulnerability or even allowing themselves to have wants and desires. I existed to please others, not myself. I existed to crave love so hungrily. I had a hole inside me that nobody’s love could fill because I never learned to love myself. I didn’t know how to.”
― Elias Jahshan, This Arab Is Queer: An Anthology by LGBTQ+ Arab Writers

“Silence is an incomplete metaphor. It can't capture frustration and complicity, its function as a retreat and a burrow. It holds a place for concealment, secrecy and deception. It holds a place for reverence. Living with a profound layer of silence wedged between yourself and your family can be such a source of sorrow, even when it is necessary.”
― Elias Jahshan, This Arab Is Queer: An Anthology by LGBTQ+ Arab Writers

“When we talk about love, the image of a heterosexual couple is accompanied by a thousand positive romantic associations. When we talk about gay men, the image is of two men having sex.”
― Elias Jahshan, This Arab Is Queer: An Anthology by LGBTQ+ Arab Writers

“A queer body is a very lonely structure.”
― Elias Jahshan, This Arab Is Queer: An Anthology by LGBTQ+ Arab Writers

“My friend explains that a queer space is one where you don't have to explain yourself. But I find myself explaining myself to myself. Is my mind not a queer space? Is my body?”
― Elias Jahshan, This Arab Is Queer: An Anthology by LGBTQ+ Arab Writers

“White people have a stunning power in English-speaking majority countries, and not in the ways that people talk about very often. The power is that they belong to, or operate in, calculated friendship cults that some people of colour want to be loved and desired within.”
― Elias Jahshan, This Arab Is Queer: An Anthology by LGBTQ+ Arab Writers

“We mirror those around us so we can pass by.”
― Elias Jahshan, This Arab Is Queer: An Anthology by LGBTQ+ Arab Writers

“Layth has heard stories of men being asked to drop their pants at checkpoints during the civil war to see if they were Christian or Muslim.”
― Elias Jahshan, This Arab Is Queer: An Anthology by LGBTQ+ Arab Writers

“In another life, one where I do not lie about love, I rush home to tell my mother.”
― Elias Jahshan, This Arab Is Queer: An Anthology by LGBTQ+ Arab Writers

“My grandfather, who would have loved you, if he could. My mother – who absolutely loved you, if only as the ever-polite best friend – is waiting up for us to come back from what she thinks is a night out.”
― Elias Jahshan, This Arab Is Queer: An Anthology by LGBTQ+ Arab Writers

“I am capable now of reflecting on my own trauma because I have a safety distance, and a hiding spot to escape to when I need.”
― Elias Jahshan, This Arab Is Queer: An Anthology by LGBTQ+ Arab Writers

“Opera signified culture and respectability because it belonged to white people.”
― Elias Jahshan, This Arab Is Queer: An Anthology by LGBTQ+ Arab Writers

“I have long learned not to offer myself as a rope to men buried in a deep emotional well. I would be pulled inside and drowned.”
― Elias Jahshan, This Arab Is Queer: An Anthology by LGBTQ+ Arab Writers

“time passing is not just loss, I had to remind myself. Something is gained, too.”
― Elias Jahshan, This Arab Is Queer: An Anthology by LGBTQ+ Arab Writers

“homophobia is replaced in western countries by anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia.”
― Elias Jahshan, This Arab Is Queer: An Anthology by LGBTQ+ Arab Writers